Seconds later, more bullets came toward me, but she was firing blind now from two hundred feet, then three hundred, no hope of hitting me. My feet got tangled in a tough hunk of sage, and I went down, tucked my face into a shoulder as I hit the ground, hands still bound behind my back. I stayed down until the bullets stopped, then looked toward the SUV, saw a tiny light where it stood in the clearing where Allie’s trailer was a pile of cold ash and scorched metal, then I got up and jogged farther into the empty desert where Julia couldn’t see me, couldn’t follow, didn’t have a hope of finding me where she might be able to erase the pure, white-hot hatred for her I carried out there in my heart.
Jeri was gone.
Forever.
She would never be back.
I slowed to a jog and tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t see a thing except blobs of dark on black. Suddenly my throat closed up and I couldn’t breathe. I fell to my knees and choked on my tears.
My love was gone.
I collapsed, folded up with my arms behind me, and sobbed.
God, Jeri—no.
No, no, no, no.
I stayed like that for a long time, unable to stand, unable to see. Finally I heard the sound of an engine. I staggered to my feet, partly hunched over. Headlights swung around in the night. Taillights put a red glow on clumps of sagebrush, then the SUV bounced away into darkness.
I vowed then that Julia would die. I would hunt her down and kill her.
Not the police. I would do it.
Me.
If I didn’t, I wasn’t worth anything on this miserable earth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I MADE MY way back to where Jeri had been murdered. She and Leland were gone, mostly likely dumped down that vertical shaft Julia had mentioned. Forty yards away I could see the black maw of a tunnel in the hillside.
Jeri would be in there.
I could hardly breathe, thinking about that.
The last dregs of moonlight revealed the remains of the trailer Julia had torched two weeks ago. I explored it, located the sharp edge of a piece of sheet metal, and went to work on the plastic tie holding my wrists together. It took ten minutes, but the tie finally popped apart and my hands came free.
I couldn’t go into the tunnel—I couldn’t not go in the tunnel. I walked over without thinking, went in thirty feet, and saw nothing. It was pitch black. Stumble around and I could fall into that shaft . . .
. . . and be with Jeri forever.
Then Julia would win, which couldn’t happen. I turned around and came back out, quivering with pain and fury. Hatred for Julia was a molten indescribable thing inside me. I had to kill her. Had to.
I walked out. The moon went behind the hills and the land was dark, illuminated by starlight—barely enough to see the trail out, a rutted track between miles of rolling sage. I checked my pockets. I still had my wallet but no cell phone.
As I walked, I thought about Jeri and Julia, Jeri and Julia, love and hate, love and hate. But now Jeri was pain that tried to bring me down, make me give up, so I concentrated on Julia. I had to get to her. She knew I was still alive. What would she do? Where would she go? How could I track her down?
The night grew cool. I shivered as I walked, stumbling in the dark. I remembered Deputy Roup saying the trailer fire had been eight or ten miles in from the highway.
A long way to go in this black, horrific night.
Julia.
I saw a knife enter her belly, slide up slowly, watched her guts spill onto the floor at her feet, saw her staring down in horror and disbelief at her own bloody intestines. I saw her die slowly, then slip away into Hell. I wasn’t the person I was yesterday or even an hour ago. Now I was a monster.
I walked.
An hour passed. Two. Three.
Julia.
She would have to run because I was alive. She would have to go soon. A cold, icy fury settled deep inside and seethed within me, allowing me to start thinking clearly again.
How would she run? Where to? She had the cash she’d used to pacify Allie. Could she put it into an account that would allow her to use a credit card? Could she use it to get prepaid cards? How would she get to that brokerage account, and when?
Thoughts of Jeri returned. I couldn’t leave her down in that pit. I had to get her, or someone did. And Ma had to be told.
Ma.
If anyone could track Julia, Ma could.
I topped a rise and saw a lone pair of headlights slowly moving through the blackness, heard the distant throb of
